CLEWS Your Home for Historic True Crime

Miscellany

Comments

All of the posts on Clews are open to comment. Some folks have had particularly interesting things to say. Of great interest to me was a remark made by a fellow who read my story about John Buettner-Janusch. The commenter was actually one of his students and offered a personal perspective on the professor. Click on the link to hear what he had to say. 

Another commenter kindly pointed out that my information on Women and the Death Penalty in Oklahoma is a tad bit out of date; two more have been executed there of late (both, incidentally, white women).

Do feel free to remark on whatever moves you. Corrections are particularly helpful, and I appreciate your time.

L.A. Noir

There are two blogs that carry stories about Los Angeles and crime. One is 8763 Wonderland by Rodger Jacobs, which exposes “the underbelly of the L.A. terrain.” Another is The 1947project, “a daily recounting of historic true crime and offbeat human interest tales, each retold 58 years from the day they happened, often featuring visits to the crime scenes as they are today.” I particularly like that blog and the old stories it has to share, as you might suspect.

Now the two blogs have joined feeds, so you can get all your west coast crime news in one feed. They are:

RSS version (for blog readers) : http://app.feeddigest.com/digest3/MB0TAXN45L.rss

Web version (for bookmarking): http://app.feeddigest.com/digest3/MB0TAXN45L.html

Straying into the Realm of Opinion

I’ve generally avoided trying to show partisanship or express strong opinions on my blog here, fearing that it will get in the way of telling some good stories. But having spent a few weeks now delving into death penalty cases and sites and theory, I’m ever-so-slowly coming to the conclusion that it doesn’t work and shouldn’t be used. Not that I wouldn’t have pulled the switch myself on some of the pukes whose stories I’ve told... but is that always the issue? I don’t think so. I think the death penalty is a bad idea for two simple reasons: the lawyering in such cases generally does more to influence the outcome than the facts, while a lot of criminal defense attorneys are not good lawyers. Second, I wouldn’t trust a jury today to take out my trash. And that’s not hyperbole.

Don’t email me telling me that I’m wildly off track. It’s my opinion, I’m entitled to it. And you won’t convince me to change my mind that a lot of criminal defense attorneys are bad, bad lawyers.

Okay, there are notable exceptions. Mark Geragos is easily one of the best criminal defense attorneys practicing in the United States today, but even he could not save his most famous client, Scott Peterson, from the death penalty. I saw Geragos interviewed on Larry King a few months ago, and he candidly admitted that the case contained what was for Geragos an insurmountable fact: Laci Peterson’s body was recovered in the exact location of Scott’s fishing-expedition alibi. If it weren’t for that one fact, Geragos maintained, Scott Peterson would be free today. I don’t doubt it.

And Detroit-area lawyer Geoffrey Fieger is also one of the best trial lawyers (in my book, the best) practicing today. (And that has nothing to do with the fact that a few years ago, before I was married, I spotted him, or rather he spotted me, in a nice Italian restaurant, and he gave me a long look and one of those slow smiles, and if I hadn’t just read a profile of his wife in a local paper, I... well... (ahem) back to blogging.) But even the amazing Fieger, who is the master of the civil courtroom, who at one point had $20 million in civil judgments sitting up in the Court of Appeals of Michigan, who can wring a multi-million-dollar medical malpractice verdict even from the notoriously stingy juries of Oakland County, Michigan, even he could not save Dr. Jack Kevorkian or Nathaniel Abraham, his most famous criminal clients.

But lawyers like Geragos and Fieger are the exceptions to the rule that most criminal defense attorneys are not good lawyers. Why is that? For one thing, not many law students are attracted to criminal law. Put simply, criminal defense work does not (generally speaking) attract the best and brightest and in some cases attracts folks who have no business being lawyers in the first place. Don’t believe me? Do I need to attach links to stories of lawyers who fall asleep during a murder trial, for crying out loud, or, even more disgusting, sleep with their clients while the charges are pending?

Moreover, you have to deal with dirtbags, and it doesn’t pay very well. When I was in law school at the University of Detroit, my crim law prof told us right off the bat that there were three basic rules to criminal practice:

“One, get paid first. Two, get paid first. Three, get paid first. If the guy is convicted, he’ll blame it on you, and you’ll never get your fee. If he’s acquitted, well, he never did it to begin with, so he’ll wonder why on earth he has to pay you.”

If the private-pay work doesn’t pan out, there’s always the court-appointed work, but attorneys are not paid well for it. Many cases are paid out at a flat rate. Where is the incentive to dig for evidence and witnesses, to spend hours in preparation?

A lot of law students these days incur heavy debt to go to law school. I was lucky and got a lot of scholarships and walked out the door with a mere $20,000 in student loan debt, which it still took me a decade to repay. A good friend from law school ended up borrowing a hundred thousand dollars to pay for it. Who can afford to practice criminal law with that kind of debt hanging over your head?

But even if you set aside the issue of the quality of the representation and the low standards for court-appointed lawyers, there’s the juries to consider. A few years ago, many states started moving away from selecting potential jurors based on voter registrations and instead moved to a system of selection based on driver’s licenses. And what a difference that made to the quality of the jury pool. Needless to say, there’s a tremendous difference in the education and intelligence of the average driver’s license holder vs. the average registered voter. Felons who can’t register to vote can now appear on juries. People who aren’t informed enough to have enough of an opinion to cast a ballot now appear on juries. Ask lawyers who’ve been in practice long enough to witness the change and they’ll tell you that the quality of the average jury plummeted.

And when it comes to the problems associated with implementing the death penalty, the quality of the lawyers and the jurors are only two issues, and there’s no easy solution to these systemic challenges. So I wonder whether we aren’t all better served in foregoing the death penalty until the day these problems are addressed. Ha ha.

Michigan and the Death Penalty—A Brief and Horrible Experience

One is hard-pressed indeed to find any death penalty cases from Michigan, because never has this state put someone to death for murder. Never. Oh, the territorial government tried it, but the last case was a terrible precedent that guaranteed the ultimate penalty would never come into use here.

In Michigan's early days, the death sentence was virtually unknown. One early experience near the territory involved a Detroiter named Patrick Fitzpatrick. In 1828, he was living in an inn on the south side of the Detroit River, in a town then known as Sandwich, now called Windsor, Ontario. When the innkeeper's daughter was found raped and murdered, Fitzpatrick was convicted and hanged for the crime.

Many immigrants to Michigan territory came from New York (as did my ancestors), and one of the New Yorkers was a man by the name of Stephen Simmons, who opened a tavern on the Detroit-Chicago Road. One night in 1830, Simmons, who was a heavy drinker, got in an argument with his wife. He struck her in the abdomen. Sadly, the blow landed just so, and she died.

Simmons was put on trial in Detroit for the killing. It turned out that Simmons had a nasty reputation as an abusive drunk. The key witnesses against him were his own two daughters, who told the jury of his whiskey-fueled rages, his savage beatings, and the details of their mother's death. It seems that Simmons came home drunk that night, woke his wife, and told her to join him in drink. The girls fled upstairs, knowing what would come next; when his wife refused to get drunk with him, he hit her in the stomach and killed her.

The jury thought the man despicable and worthy of the death penalty--even though there was never any shred of proof that the murder was premeditated, and, strictly speaking, it wasn't murder. Simmons was found guilty, and the judge sentenced him to die by hanging.

The county sheriff sharply disagreed with the verdict and sentence, and, strictly speaking once again, the sheriff was right. But the governor of the territory, Lewis Cass, wanted to see justice meted, so Governor Cass appointed an enthusiastic hotelkeeper who volunteered to act as sheriff for the purpose of putting Simmons to death. The real sheriff resigned in disgust.

The new sheriff made quite a production of the procedure, which would take place at Farmer Street at Gratiot Avenue, for those who know downtown Detroit. The new sheriff also arranged temporary seating around the gallows, vendors to sell refreshments, and a military band to perform a two-hour concert before the big event. Advertisements, newspaper coverage, and word of mouth spread throughout the territory, and hundreds, if not thousands, of spectators came for the gala.

The appointed day came, the band played, and the condemned man was led to the gallows. The crowds listened to Simmons' speech on the evils of drink and then watched in growing shame as he burst into a hymn:

Show pity, Lord, O Lord, forgive, Let a repenting rebel live; Are not Thy mercies full and free? May not a sinner trust in Thee? My crimes are great, but can't surpass The power and glory of Thy grace, Great God, Thy nature hath no bound, So let Thy pardoning love be found.

Well, pardoning love was nowhere in sight at the moment, and Simmons was dropped. But his hymn, his booming voice begging for forgiveness, haunted the assembly, and the backlash began.

And then, five years after Simmons was put to death for an offense that--terrible though it was--did not warrant the death penalty, the old case of Patrick Fitzpatrick, the man that had been hanged just south of the river in 1828, was back in the news. Because another man confessed on his deathbed to raping and killing the innkeeper's daughter. Patrick Fitzpatrick was innocent.

Between the Simmons and the Fitzpatrick cases, Michiganders developed a sour taste for the death penalty, and in 1847, Michigan became the first state in the Union--indeed, by some accounts, the first democracy in the English-speaking world--to abolish the death penalty.

Simmons was not the last man hanged in Michigan, though the authorities would have had it that way. In 1938, the federal government hanged a bank robber by the name of Tony Chebatoris for killing a bystander during a holdup in Midland. Then Governor Frank Murphy begged President Roosevelt to move Chebatoris's execution out of state, but the federal authorities insisted on hanging him in Michigan.

To this day, the ghosts of Stephen Simmons and Patrick Fitzpatrick still haunt the state, and there is never any serious talk about bringing the death penalty to Michigan.

Sources:

Michigan's Death Penalty History by Marietta Jaeger-Lane

Michigan Rogues, Desperados & Cut-Throats by Tom Powers (Friede Publications, 2002).

Recommended reading: A Hanging in Detroit: Stephen Gifford Simmons and the Last Execution Under Michigan Law by David G. Chardoavoyne.

McCurdy’s Long Journey to the Grave

It was 1976, and The Six Million Dollar Man ruled the networks (remember that show? "He was better than he was before... better... stronger... faster....." I loved those bionic sound effects). The producers planned an episode of the adventure series that would take place in an old funhouse, and they found the perfect set in Long Beach, California. It was called "Laugh in the Dark," and it featured the typical "funhouse" decor--skeletons, wax figures, ghosts, etc. One of the wax dummies in particular caught the director's eye; it was painted a glow-in-the-dark orange and hung from the ceiling on a makeshift gallows. The director wanted the hanged man moved, and a crewman who carried out the order was perturbed to find that the dummy's arm fell off, revealing--a human bone!

It wasn't a dummy, it was a mummy. That was a little too much reality for television circa 1976, so the discovery was taken to the L.A. County medical examiner's office, where an examination confirmed that the funhouse prop was indeed a petrified human corpse.

An autopsy revealed that the body was that of a male. All of his internal organs were present, conserved with arsenic, which hadn't been used for embalming in many decades. The examination also revealed an old-fashioned copper-jacketed .32 bullet, which was fished out of the pelvic area. The coroner's office determined that the man had died of gunshot wounds some time around the turn of the century.

A hunt through the historical records revealed that the body probably belonged to one Elmer J. McCurdy. The coroner's office used what was then a relatively little known identification technique known as "medial superimposition"--they took known photos of McCurdy and overlaid them with x-rays of the funhouse mummy. The identification was confirmed.

McCurdy was born in 1869 and became a hard drinker, a loner, and by one account a murderer as well as a notorious train robber. In October, 1911, McCurdy, one of the last of the western badmen, was cornered in a barn by a sheriff's posse near Pawhuska, Oklahoma. McCurdy declared that he would never be taken alive, at which point the sheriff's men indulged him, and Elmer died with his boots on.

The outlaw's body initially went to a funeral home in Pawhuska, but nobody claimed him. They embalmed him and put him in a back room. The funeral home had a few offers for his corpse from showmen (mummies were common to carnivals and traveling "freak shows" until the 1930s) but the funeral home refused these offers. Then two "cousins" from California came to finally claim old Elmer, and his long journey to the grave began.

After such long and ignominious treatment, Elmer McCurdy came to his final resting place in 1977. Following the belated funeral in Guthrie, Oklahoma, Elmer was buried in the same cemetery that hosted such infamous badmen as Wild Bill Doolin and Tom Capers (who was known only for the crude newspaper headline that followed his murder during a dice game: CAPERS CRAPS OUT.) The town residents gave him full honors, including a parade to the cemetery replete with wild west costumes, fire engines, the whole nine yards--which was probably more than old Elmer McCurdy, murderer, gun-toting desperado, railroad-robbing thug, fluorescent orange carnival dummy--ever deserved.

Sources:

"Mummified Body of Desperado," by the Associated Press, Indiana (Pennsylvania) Gazette, Dec. 13, 1976.

"Elmer McCurdy's Body Goes Home to Boot Hill," by United Press, Elyria Chronicle Telegram, April 17, 1977.

"Oklahoma Cemetery Burial Place of Frontier Outlaws," by Bill Johnson, Associated Press, Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune, Nov. 10, 1987.

Coroner at Large, by Thomas T. Noguchi, M.D. (Simon & Schuster, 1985).

Find-A-Grave on Elmer McCurdy

Recommended Reading: Elmer McCurdy: The Misadventures in Life and Afterlife of an American Outlaw by Mark Svengold -- a biography of the man and the mummy.

Women and the Death Penalty in Oklahoma, An Historical Review: Racism or Just Rewards?

Females forced to pay the highest price for committing murder make for fascinating subjects, because generally it requires a particularly reprehensible act to knock a woman from the proverbial pedestal and through the hangman's trap door. Generally. Based on the prospect that others might find this an interesting subject, I plan to write of these women as time permits, and exploring them by state seems a tidy way to do it.

Massachusetts I've addressed. Next up: Oklahoma, a border West state neighboring two others that are just as liberal in applying the death penalty--Texas and Missouri. Though Oklahoma has put to death dozens of killers over the years, only two have been women. Both were black. Was race a factor, as some have claimed?

The woman most recently executed was named Wanda Jean Allen, and she was killed by lethal injection in January, 2001, for the murder of her girlfriend, Gloria Leathers.

The two met in prison (where Wanda Allen was serving time for manslaughter for killing another friend), and upon release they moved in together. Their relationship was marked by violence and frequent calls for police intervention. On the last day they were together, they got in a bitter fight over money at a grocery store, and Gloria decided she'd had enough. She brought the police and her mother to their apartment, collected her things, and perhaps got in another fistfight with Wanda Allen. After more ugly exchanges between them, Gloria went to the police department to file a complaint against Wanda, who followed her there, and outside the building she shot her in the head and killed her. Wanda was convicted of premeditated, first-degree murder and sentenced to death.

Some who examine this case claim that it is unusual to mete out the death penalty for a "domestic violence case." Her advocates, who included Rev. Jesse Jackson, saw racism and an anti-gay double standard and pointed to her low IQ as a mitigating factor.

Well, maybe. It certainly does seem to be the case that murders born of domestic violence are generally classified as cases of second-degree murder, but under egregious circumstances, these types of murders will earn even a white male the death penalty. In fact, next week, Missouri will execute a man named Timothy Johnston for the beating death of his wife.

Johnston killed his wife Nancy in 1989 in a particularly savage manner. After the couple got in a dispute at a bar, he came home alone. He shot up the house while he waited for her. By the time she returned, he was in a boil. He jumped on the car as she tried to flee; he managed to smash out the windshield and drag her through it. Then he stomped on her in the street, threw her in the car, and continued the beating on their front lawn and inside the home. She died of multiple internal injuries, but he kept beating her dead body.

Like Wanda Allen's defenders, Timothy Johnston's attorneys claimed that there was no premeditation and Johnston was in a blind rage, which should have merited a conviction for second-degree murder only. But prosecutors pointed to a history of violent acts in securing the conviction and death penalty.

The case certainly sounds a lot like Wanda Allen's. Both killed their partners in a public place. Both had histories of extreme violence. Both got the same punishment.

That said, the newspaper articles and even the CNN coverage of Wanda Allen's case made much of the fact that only one other woman was ever executed in (territorial) Oklahoma. Though none of these articles ever bothered to provide any details at all regarding the older case, they point out that the first woman executed there was also black, as though two dots make a pattern. Let's see. 

It was 1903, near South McAlister, Indian Territory; a 7-year-old girl named Annie Williams was whipped so severely that she died. The woman who whipped her, Dora Wright, 31, was put on trial for the girl's death. The evidence included testimony that when the child's body was examined, it showed that she had been beaten severely for many months. Her skin carried old scars showing the girl had been struck and tortured with a red hot poker.

On May 30, 1903, the jury decided in twenty minutes that Dora Wright was guilty of little Annie's murder. Given the obvious, sustained, and severe abuse the poor child had suffered at Dora's hands, the jury declined to recommend life imprisonment, and thus the "negress" was sentenced to the extreme penalty. She was hanged on July 17, 1903, along with a white man named Charles Barrett, who was convicted of robbery and murder. The executions were carried out in a carnival atmosphere. The press accounts remarked that Dora Wright "mounted the scaffold without a tremor."

So was racism or anti-gay sentiment a factor for Wanda Allen? Was racism a factor for Dora Wright?

I don't see it. I see two juries looking past gender to the hearts of extremely violent women and giving them their just rewards for cruelly ending the lives of others.

Sources:

"Savage Wife Beater and Murderer To Be Executed," by Jana Shortt, St. Louis Metro Evening Whirl, August 16, 2005.

"Woman Guilty," Newark Daily Advocate, May 30, 1903.

"Gala Day in the Territory," Lima Times Democrat, July 17, 1903.

"Whipped Girl to Death," Ottumwa Daily Courier, July 17, 1903.

1900 Census, Choctaw Nation, I.T.

On vacation!

Your correspondent is going on a much-needed holiday to Mackinac Island and won't be back for a bit. Not wanting to disappoint, I thought I'd share some of my favorite crime, history, and journalism links.

The Riverside Press Enterprise wrote a piece on Friday headlined "Blogs Joining Crime Fight," quoting yours truly and some experts on the phenomenon of crime blogging and what it portends.

The History News Network is the premier site for intelligent discussion of history and its impact on today's society.

Editor & Publisher follows trends in print journalism and occasionally offers stories of specific interest to true crime buffs, such as pieces about reporters who face dilemmas in covering crime stories (like the one about the lady who removed her boyfriend's offending member or the guy who died of internal injuries after intercourse with a horse... play it straight or play it up?).

The Fredericksburg (Va.) Free Lance-Star has an interesting opinion piece on the intersection of sprawl and serial killers... is there a connection?

The Special Constable's Blog shares stories from the front lines in England's crime war, told by a part-time volunteer policeman who offers interesting observations on law enforcement techniques and training, everyday pedestrian crime, and the ugly side of humanity. Worth reading for the slang alone.

The CrimProf Blog, part of the Law Professor Blogs Network, is a group blog on law and crime.

The School for Scoundrels offers a collection of stories and photos on the "rogues, thimble-riggers and three-card monte men" of the western gambling fraternity, who elevated games of chance to a bloody art.

Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism blogs about all sorts of subjects, including citizen journalism, and is in the middle of moving his blog from Typepad. My favorite piece by Gillmor is his call for newspapers to open their archives to researchers for free. Amen!

Enjoy!

On This Curious New Subgenre

I write in vulgar vein using the language of hucksters and pedlars.

--Lu Hsun, The True Story of Ah Q

The Bookhouse Boy, a blogger who writes about crime in the news and culture, recently gathered together yours truly, Steve Huff of The Dark Side, and Trench of The Trenchcoat Chronicles and News of Doom, for a cyber-chat on the subject of true crime blogging. The result: The First True Crime Blog Roundtable and Potluck Bingo Dance, in which the four musketeers attempt to rationalize our mania for dark and terrible stories, and perhaps the even more curious habit of sharing them for free.

The Bizarre Train Robbery Trial of Jesse James, Jr.

Post deleted. Sorry - you'll have to wait for the book!

Crime Bloggers In the News and In General

A true crime blogger has made the news (and it's not a newspaper editorial denigrating crime blogging)! Blogger Steve Huff made an appearance over the weekend on Fox TV's "At Large" program. Huff, who closely follows news on the capture of suspected serial killers (and who is a busy man these days), posited on his blog in mid-July a possible connection between suspected serial killer Joseph Duncan and a cold case in California, the kidnapping and murder of a child named Anthony Martinez. His hypothesis panned out: Duncan has been re-fingerprinted and linked to Martinez's death via a partial thumbprint found at the scene.

Being a political and social moderate who eschews shrill and disrespectful voices on both sides of the great divide, I'd never before tuned in to Fox News. But I had to make an exception when Fox interviewed Steve Huff Saturday night. I was impressed. The lead-in piece, a summary of the Duncan case narrated by Geraldo Rivera, was quite well written and not the sensationalism I expected. The questions put to Steve Huff were good ones, and it was a long interview by cable news standards. Huff showed mastery of the facts, but perhaps most interesting was his remark that when he heard Joseph Duncan had a computer science degree, and figuring that he was a "narcissistic psychopath," Huff concluded that Duncan probably had a blog and probably used his own name on it. Right on both counts.

I don't know what you call it when a computer whiz like Huff deputizes himself, finds obscure websites authored by suspected murderers, and parses them for clues to crimes, but Huff has done it more than once, and the material he uncovers is impressive no matter what the method is called. He elevates all bloggers and shows what can be done with this new medium.

While I'm at it, I should mention a couple of other blogs that are taking a long, hard look at Duncan. One is JetDuncan.com, an anonymous website begun on July 4 that also serves as a resource for cyber-sleuths and citizens to offer tips and thoughts. It has a detailed timeline and links to court documents and websites Duncan contributed to or created. Another is jetd63.blogspot.com, an anonymous blog that has closely followed Duncan developments.

On the subject of crime blogging in general, I cannot help but mention the other crime bloggers out there, The Bookhouse Boy and Trench; the latter closely follows "I don't like mondays"/Columbine-style school violence and weird crime news in general, and has distilled his "News of Doom" to its own site.

There are also some new members of our tiny fraternity. Another irreverent look at crime headlines, a group blog called Blottered, which dubs itself a "blogging community college," came to my attention after the folks there liked my "Nutty Professor" story and referred to me as a "classy auburn-locked broad" (umm... thanks?). It clearly appears to be aimed at a college audience; as I was reading it, I was reminded of recent remarks made by Tom Wolfe ("I Am Charlotte Simmons"), who observed that today's college age youth (Generation--what letter are we up to? Z?) employ the "f" word in ways their elders never imagined, as noun, verb, adjective, adverb, interjection, and everything in between. Well, crime blogging might lend itself, I suppose. (Should we dub them Generation F?) A warning to anyone over thirty: the puzzling references to current pop culture will leave you feeling downright arthritic.

Enjoy!

The Very Nutty Professor

John Buettner-Janusch was on the far end of the bell curve in many respects. Unquestionably brilliant, Janusch was a geneticist, a primatologist, a prolific author, and one of the leading physical anthropologists of his generation. He taught at several research universities in the United States, including Michigan, Wayne, Yale, Utah, and Duke.

And he was quite cracked in the head.

Janusch was chairing the anthropology department at New York University when the first hints emerged that he'd put his extraordinary scientific mind to a criminal bent. How he imagined that he could keep his curious laboratory experiments a secret is a mystery, but in 1979, the prominent professor was indicted by a federal grand jury in Manhattan for making LSD and methaqualone (quaaludes) in the school lab.

His colleagues at NYU were thunderstruck, certain that it was a group of renegade students who were responsible for the concoctions. Their shock is more easily imagined than described when, in 1980, Professor Janusch was convicted and sentenced for manufacturing drugs and found himself transferred from the hallowed ivory tower to a decidedly public institution, where he remained for three years.

Upon his release from prison, Janusch decided to take energetic measures to exact his revenge. He returned to the lab and cooked up a brew consisting of some exotic poisons: atropine (a naturally occurring alkaloid of atropia belladonna or deadly nightshade), sparteine (a compound derived from the European shrub Scotch broom, Cytisus scoparius), and pilocarpine hydrochloride (an alkaloid found in the leaves of a South American shrub, Pilocarpus jaborandi). This he injected into some pieces of chocolate. These he boxed and mailed anonymously to the home of the judge who sentenced him and the homes of some of his former colleagues.

If his vicious intention was to poison the families of his targets, he succeeded. The judge's wife ate four pieces of the chocolate and collapsed. The wife and daughter of a former colleague also became quite ill. Fortunately, they all recovered, and another two boxes of chocolate were intercepted.

The mad scientist was arrested on his way home from the opera. Soon thereafter, he died of pneumonia in a federal prison.

NYU found itself freshly scandalized. But the university community had no reason to feel embarrassed. After all, Harvard has graduated enough murderers to thoroughly satisfy the gossips in any alumni circle. And many of those gentlemen took degrees in divinity. All of which only goes to show that genius and moral character are not on the same chromosome, arguably the most profound result of any of Professor Janusch's scientific work.

Sources:

"Prof Accused of Making Illegal Drugs in Lab," by the United Press International, Elyria (Ohio) Chronicle Telegram, Oct. 5, 1979.

"Arrest Upsets NYU," by the Associated Press, Syracuse Post Standard, Oct. 6, 1979.

"Jailed Professor Seeks Revenge With Poisoned Valentine Candies," by Reuters, the Kingston (Jamaica) Gleaner, Feb. 23, 1987.

"Poisoned-Candy Prof Sentenced to 40 Years," by the Associated Press, Syracuse Post Standard, July 15, 1987.

"John Buettner-Janusch, created drugs in lab," Chicago Daily Herald,  July 5, 1992.

Murderers Are Morons: Exhibit No. 489,937

In response to the eternal question why...

"I just liked to kill."

--Ted Bundy

"It just wasn't their night."

--Richard Speck

"Shit happens."

--Robert Cloutier

"To get back at her."

--Wendell White (who killed his baby in front of his girlfriend)

"I really can't say."

--Mauro Barraza (who stomped an old lady to death)

"She had evil in her eyes."

--Coral Eugene Watts

"It occurred to me."

--Albert Fish